The Jewish Peoplehood exchange, part 2: Is Jewish unity a thing of the past?

Noam Pianko is the Samuel N. Stroum Professor of Jewish Studies and Associate Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies. Pianko also directs the Samuel and Althea Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and serves as the Herbert and Lucy Pruzan Chair of Jewish Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies/Judaic Studies from Yale University in 2004 and joined the Jackson School faculty as an Assistant Professor in the fall of that year. Pianko serves on the Executive Board of the American Jewish Historical Society, and has been nominated for a three-year term on the American Jewish Studies board. He has been awarded a Mellon Foundation Fellowship, a UW Technology Teaching Fellowship, a Royalty Research Award, and a Wexner Graduate Fellowship. Professor Pianko is the author of Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn, and he has been published extensively in leading journals.

This exchange focuses on Professor Pianko’s new book, Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation (Rutgers, 2015). Part 1 can be found here.

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Dear Professor Pianko,

I would like to ask you to elaborate a bit on the paradigm and the “outdated set of realities” you mentioned. If one accepts your argument about Jewish peoplehood being a 20th century creation, what more needs to be realized in order for the type of Jewish solidarity it spurred to live well into the future? 

Yours,

Shmuel.

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One of my formative experiences of Jewish peoplehood took place in the early 1980s, when I was about 10.  I remember participating in Solidary Sunday marches—huge rallies for Soviet Jews in front of the United Nations building. Along with my Hebrew school classmates and thousands of other Jews, I waved “let my people go” signs and chanted Am Yisrael Chai.

No matter where we Jews were born, what language we spoke, or what religious practices we followed, there was something in our blood connecting our pasts, present, and future.  A common essence and core identity transcended space and time and brought us all together. The unquestionable sense of unity defined us, and the term for that unity was Jewish peoplehood.

The assumptions embedded in this expression of Jewish peoplehood illustrate the outdated set of realities I referred to in our earlier conversation. The argument that Jewishness is in our common core and will follow us from birth to death does not work as a way of capturing the diversity, hybridity, and fluidity of identity today.

I sense the tension between the idea of peoplehood I grew up with and the world inhabited by my students when I walk around campus at the University of Washington, where I teach.  For example, I notice the increasing number of “mixed-race” groups advertising their activities. The fluidity between ethnic, religious, and racial identities today make claims about direct blood ties seem outdated, and even, morally problematic. We see a similar ideal of blurry group boundaries in the image of Barack Obama. He represents multiple traditions as single person. He is multi-racial, born in America and yet spent significant time in the international community. Applying a very simple system of blood lines, geographic location, or national history only captures a small part of how we, as Americans or Jews, identify today.

Jewish families increasingly exemplify this trend toward multi-ethnic mixing. The imagined connection going back to Moses that 10-year-old me assumed I shared with my Russian Jewish counterpart would be much more difficult to imagine for a young Jew today whose parents converted or who was adopted from another country. The ideal of unity is also undermined by wildly divergent views in the Jewish community a whole range of political issue. Perhaps one of the most obvious areas of political disagreement is precisely in the area that served as the core for the historical model of peoplehood—the very idea of the Homeland as the primary anchor for group solidarity.

We can’t accept that peoplehood is black and white or all or nothing. Nor should we accept that the model of peoplehood I experience as a young boy has more validity than other expressions of Jewish collectivity. After all, Jews historically did not articulate their identity by holding secular political rallies in front of international political organizations as a sign of Jewish solidarity. It wasn’t even a possible idea. Jewish peoplehood introduced a new language and concept for affirming group identity.

We need a new basis for thinking about what connects Jews to one another. So what can we do to make peoplehood a more expansive and useful notion? 

The outdated model of peoplehood prioritized identifying essence, promoting unity, and guarding boundaries. So, community leaders and thinkers asked:

1) Who are you? (A question often linked to: who are your parents and will you marry somebody Jewish so you have Jewish children);

2) What core value(s) unite you to other Jews; and

3) What boundaries differentiate you from individuals in other groups (In particular, how does anti-Semitism continue to make Jews outsiders).

Let’s shift the conversation to considering the actions that Jews take in the world, encouraging Jews to think about what makes their Jewishness meaningful, and acknowledging the fact that Jews are members of other groups that also matter to them. Future leaders have a new set of questions for understanding the state of peoplehood.

1) What do you do? (Do you choose to associate yourself with a Jewish community?)

2) What makes Jewishness meaningful to you? (Do you find engaging with Jews or Judaism meaningful?)

3) How do you integrate and balance your association with multiple ethnic, national, and religious communities? (How does identifying as a Jew remain important as you navigate multiple group and family allegiances?)

There is a future for Jewish peoplehood. But, the future paradigm will need to acknowledge that Jews around the globe are more fragmented, disconnected, and lack consensus. Unity, essence, and boundaries met the needs of a very particular moment in Jewish history. But not this moment. Figuring out what meets the needs of our moment in Jewish history is the only way to make sure Jewish peoplehood can continue to exist as a meaningful concept today.